Here's a Photo of Jeffrey Epstein and Saudi Arabia's Future King Having a Laugh

I said that this was coming and here it is. The butcher of Riyadh with the 21st century's most infamous sexual predator.

Feb 19, 2026

And there it is.

Exactly what I suspected would come with the release of the Epstein files.

In July I published this transcript of an excerpt from an interview I did with the late investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein in 2023 where he discussed his experience interviewing Epstein with me:

EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN:

When I went to his house, the walls were covered with pictures of MBS [Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, future king of Saudi Arabia, current prime minister, and de factor ruler today], and more important, MBZ [Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the UAE] the picture of MBS’s were arms around Jeffrey’s shoulders.
Maybe these were photoshopped, they didn’t look photoshopped to me. And as a lot of people from the Middle East came over to Jeffrey’s house, I don’t think he would have put fake pictures up because they would have noticed it. They also knew MBS.
…
Jeffrey thought—when I say thought, I say what he told me—Jeffrey told me that the important person was not MBS, with MBZ. He said MBZ had created MBS and ran his career through his own intelligence service, that he was the real power in the Gulf, Gulf Arabs. And Jeffrey said he was friends with him. He was also friends with... Now I forget his name. But he was the… I actually met him once… He was the head of the free port in the country of Djibouti. On the corner of Africa, he might have also been vice president, he was very powerful in the government of Djabutu, I can’t find his name.
But in any case, there was a free port in Djibouti, which he said the Arabs put their paintings and as well as homes and and that’s where huge transactions were conducted, because they can move some paintings worth $100 million. Some Andy Warhols from one locker to another locker and there was no evidence that such a transaction happened.
…
And Jeffrey thought that he was going to do a huge business in helping the royal families of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates hide their money so if there were any revolutions or changes, regime changes, coups, coups or revolutions, they would have money hidden abroad, and that was his specialty.
When I first met Jeffrey, way, way back in 1987, he talked about Khashoggi. Adnan Khashoggi—not the person who was assassinated—who was a huge arms dealer and a huge factor was the Saudi royal family. And I didn’t think that was true by the way, but he’s told me he was basically hiding money for him. I doubted that was true.
…
There were always pictures, both MBZ and MBS, you know, covering the walls as well as pictures of Bill Clinton. That's all I can recall offhand, in terms of the pictures, but there weren’t one, two or three, there were more like 15 of MBS snorkeling. Yeah, snorkeling with spear guns or spear fishing. And they were in bathing suit. Remember MBS was a relatively young man. And so this was 2013 or 14, I don’t know what year. It was 10 or 11 years ago. And so he was, you know, in his late 20s, or something like that.
…
Now, as far as geo-politics went, I think Jeffrey had a pretty clear idea that the oil money that was flowing into these countries, made them—I’m talking about the Gulf—made them incredibly powerful in the world of finance as sovereign funds of a billion dollars that can invest in anything and not even notice... And so he thought more in terms of—and he also thought in terms of being stable. He believed that they were modernizing their country. And at least he thought that MBS was modernizing Saudi Arabia. And thus, it was safe for him to live there.
In fact, if he had moved to Saudi Arabia, he probably would never have been arrested. They probably never would have extradited him. Yeah. The fact that he was Jewish, and Saudis, well, you you know, Jared Kushner has done well in Saudi Arabia.

In response to this, I wrote at the time:

What if the potential impact of the Epstein story goes much further than the domestic political battlefield of Democrats vs. Republicans, the context in which most far-right conspiracy theorists want to frame it?
What if some of these men who were so aligned with Jeffrey Epstein were ultra-wealthy Middle Eastern oligarchs, or even royals, who now have deep business ties entwined with the president through his son-in-law, Jared Kushner - perhaps golf-buddy-turned-amateur-diplomat Steve Witkoff, as well as probably a whole team of grifters, fraudsters, and assorted con artists orbiting Trump World?
How would the world change? What impact could such revelations leave on international politics, if it happened that a future king of the world’s most powerful Muslim nation appeared on the list? Who might benefit from such a turn of events and who might suffer catastrophic financial losses? Might anyone end up in jail or even assassinated to shut them up?

So what do the Epstein files have to say about MBS?

Let’s do a little fishing and find out. Here’s just a sampling:

(HBJ refers to Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani of Qatar.)

Here Epstein emails himself an alert about MBS:

And here he is sharing MBS-related New York Times opinion pieces with friends, including former Harvard President Larry Summers:

The emails suggest that Epstein was essentially conducting shadow diplomacy between the Arab monarchies:

This Sultan bin Sulayem has just resigned from his role as CEO of Dubai port giant DP World:

Particular suspicion has grown around him due to references to a “torture video.”

This analysis sent to Epstein in 2017 struck me as interesting:

This is just bizarre. Epstein acting as this international power broker in 2018 trying to negotiate peace in Yemen:

I asked Gemini (which I’ve been testing the last few months as a ChatGPT replacement): “Who the hell is this emailing Jeffrey Epstein?”

The 1.5 million deal with Lionsgate seems a giveaway.

After a bit of wrangling it suggested Karyna Shuliak, who was one of Epstein’s final girlfriends. That seems like a good guess. But why should her name be redacted here?

Steve Bannon… that multiple-shirt-wearing bastard who transformed Breitbart.com from a fun, libertarian-conservative blog to a Far Right fascist hellhole… I will never forgive him… And this just confirms further who and what he is…